Edinburgh Napier University

  Compared to an ordinary sensor network, Linear Sensor Networks (LSNs) has many applications in a number of areas such as surveillance and monitoring of international boundaries for illegal crossing, river environment monitoring and roads monitoring etc. However, due to linear topology and single path transmission of data, problems associated with LSNs is also significantly high. A linear topology increases the challenges associated with network reliability, connectivity and efficient energy management for sensors and actuators. It is therefore important to overcome these challenges prior to communication and reliable monitoring system that can be achieved in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This paper aims to investigate the linear placement of sensor nodes in LSNs using varying distance and its impact on energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, throughput and the Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) construction time. The study is carried out using a uniform topology, where nodes are distributed linearly with increased distance, while the sink is placed at the end of the pipeline. Furthermore, the proposed study also fulfil the requirements of IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) in LSNs. From the obtained results, it was evident that placing sensor nodes uniformly in LSNs at a distance of 10 meters provide optimum results in terms of Quality of Service (QoS).